By Gretchen Shirm

April 22, 2016 — 3.31pm

MEMOIR

Avalanche

JULIA LEIGH

Author, screenwriter and director Julia Leigh.
Credit:Nick Hudson

HAMISH HAMILTON, $24.99

Advertisement

Like many successful women of her generation, Julia Leigh found herself in her late 30s with an unexpected desire to have a child. Avalanche is a riveting account of her experience with IVF and a reflection on an industry that profits from a woman's diminishing fertility.

Avalanche by Julia Leigh.

At one point Leigh writes that a decision to have children is "telescopically micro not macro" and this phrase could be used to describe the memoir itself. By illuminating the poignant details of her individual reality, Leigh's book takes on a significance that extends beyond its own terms.

In matter-of-fact prose, Leigh writes of the rekindling of a relationship with a man with whom she had a tempestuous, year-long affair in her 20s. The book opens with the sudden blazing hope that the union might produce a child. "The sun exploded and reformed," Leigh writes after they marry and take the preliminary steps towards IVF.

There is an aching tension in these passages and even through separations and reconciliations, it's impossible to remain unmoved by Leigh's hope. Still, with a handful of judicious and poetic details, Leigh sets us up for heartbreak, "a champagne glass emptying onto the ground" at a wedding, for example.

When the pair become estranged, Leigh decides to proceed with IVF and at first her ex-husband agrees to act as a sperm donor, though later withdraws his consent. The remainder of this slender but potent book is dedicated to Leigh's time finding another donor and undertaking IVF treatment with a view to having and raising a child alone.

This rigorously intimate account of Leigh's personal experience is a clear departure from the cool elegance of her novels. In Leigh's fictional landscape her characters' thoughts are mostly hidden from us. Her internationally acclaimed 1999 debut, The Hunter, which raised questions about the ethics of genetic research, followed a fanatical agent dispatched to the Tasmanian wilderness to hunt the last surviving Tasmanian tiger.

In the emotionally charged Disquiet (2011), a woman fled her husband to live in rural France and that character's ambivalence towards motherhood has an obvious resonance with the issues examined here. Leigh's fictions are beautifully observed but sometimes coy, like distant worlds contained beneath glass.

Here Leigh embraces the messiness of human experience, capturing not only the facts of her IVF treatment, but the nuance of her internal responses to it. When she pays more than $10,000 to freeze her eggs, Leigh plays her "inner trick of pretending it was all Monopoly money". Indeed, her reaction to the failure of successive IVF cycles is captured with such composure it is exquisitely painful to read. She writes, "the process was forever throwing up new ways to be disappointed that I hadn't dreamt existed".

Some aspects of her experience will be familiar to IVF patients: the daily shots of the hormone Gonal-f; the tell-tale insulated bag IVF patients carry; and the way that eggs, embryos and hormone levels are graded, rated and assessed, and every aspect of the process statistically analysed. Leigh captures the deep-seated suspicion of one's own body that can develop through such close monitoring.

There is a political element here, too. Leigh confronts opposition to her decision to have children as a single mother from those closest to her who consider it selfish to want to raise a child alone, including her ex-husband who tells her she "didn't know how to love". Leigh also questions her own motivations, including her suspicion that a child might provide "an inviolable reason for being". She is confronting a deeply ingrained double standard that forces women to make personal sacrifices for the sake of their careers, while at the same time labelling women who make that choice as self-centred.

Moreover, what are the ethics of an industry "predicated on failure"? In the parking spot reserved for doctors at her clinic, Leigh notices a Bentley. Avalanche suggests that women are sold the possibility of conception, however unlikely it may be. More than once, when a fertilised embryo is implanted into her uterus, her doctor refers to it as her "baby", notwithstanding the uncertainty of that outcome. Leigh perseveres through several heart-rending IVF cycles as she turns 42 then 43, and it would certainly be difficult for even her critics to doubt her commitment.

During the process Leigh was careful who she told about her treatment, aware she might provoke discomfort in friends because of her "proximity to the abyss". Yet, at the heart of this book lies an overwhelming generosity; a willingness to impart personal experience for the insight it offers others. Avalanche examines unspeakable things and, by speaking of them honestly and clearly, renders them quietly luminous and bright.

Julia Leigh is a guest at Sydney Writers' Festival, May 16-22. swf.org.au; Gretchen Shirm's novel Where the Light Falls will be published by Allen & Unwin in July.